Boxcutter Production!?

[_TraX_]

Love this guy, most definately a pioneer. I'm just wondering if anyone can help me out with questions about his style:

He's incredible with his effects! Like he can randomly throw in flanger on an ongoing loop and makes it sound easy,any tips on how to do that?
His percussion flows soooo welll, it's like a twitchy drum player is in there playing for his songs. Listen to Windfall, or that ride symbol in Rusty Break, how does he get it to sound so layered and realistic?

Anyways, this guy is mad talented, idk if he's still making tunes? Can't get enough of him

[craic_addict]

sure is mate and still runs round Belfast. New CD out too. Nice guy so why not givem a mail?

[ComfiStile]

When you say 'runs', you mean plays?

Wouldn't mind seeing him sometime.

[_TraX_]

sure is mate and still runs round Belfast. New CD out too. Nice guy so why not givem a mail?

Lucky, theres like no Dubstep action over here in Canada, well, compared to U.K.

And how would I send him mail?

[Genevieve]

I currently make music similar to Boxcutter's as we both have similar backgrounds (I come from breakcore, while he originally made that Squarepusher'y shit). As for the effects, it's all about automating them or even their individual parameters individually. Having said that, most of the crazy shit you can do effect wise, you can do by altering the element itself rather than throwing an effect on there (reverse +speed up/slow down, etc).

As far as drums go, it's either breaks. Or processing one shots you would process those messed up jungle breaks the way Squarepusher and Mike P did. Resample the whole drum like and slow it up or down, make the volume stutter, retrigger, etc.

[The Wests]

Boxcutter definitely comes from an electronica background (Barry Lynn – Balancing Lakes was the stuff he did before his garage stuff…..

The rusty break is a famous break in its own right, real nice hat/snare interplay and obviously nice tone… the drum effects are yea just glitch effects really…. If you are lazy you would use a plugin like dbGlitch (problem with that is that the effect step sequencer is rigid to a straight 16th grid so you cant add like triplet effects or stuff like that) or some of the Audio Damage stuff, if you are on it and can be arsed to spend an hour manually glitching your drums you can get some nice results….which you can obviously do a number of ways, you could double your drum track and feed one it into a multi effects box and cross fade between the two loops or use your mutes on the mixer, you could resample the drums and add individual effects to individual sections (we did this on the first section of our track “Dj Playdough…. On our soundcloud – all the glitch type effects are individually added – took time!)

Plenty of options to get that type of drum sound….. it basically just takes effort and time to do that type of stuff if you want to do it well….if you are slack, you can get something workable really quick, but the sounds will be generic as most people are lazy… the best glitch effects come from high quality plugin like the waves bundles…. You have also got to rmemebr to eq them effects as well, so if you have got a 16 bar loop you wanna work, you might have like 100 individual edits that all need eqing and balancing!

[erratech]

You need the waves bundle to make glitches? Good to know

[The Wests]

I wouldn’t say need per se, just the high end ones have a better sound quality to them…. Glitching is pretty much what, flanging, phasing, distorting, reversing, amplitude modulation, ring modulations etc etc…. with the exception of a decent distortion (Izotope Trash is a good high end one IMO) IMO I think waves makes the best sounding stuff… GRM also, but the waves enigma is a bad boy for all types of stuff, the soundshifters, pitchshifters, even the morphoder all make real nice glitch noises as well and you can really abuse the Doppler as well….

Izotope also good for glitching….

[kaiori breathe]

Jack Dark vsts in general are pretty cool for glitchy stuff, won't really sound very boxcutter-ish but if you're into glitchy sounds they're good plugins if you can find them.

[_TraX_]

I currently make music similar to Boxcutter's as we both have similar backgrounds (I come from breakcore, while he originally made that Squarepusher'y shit). As for the effects, it's all about automating them or even their individual parameters individually. Having said that, most of the crazy shit you can do effect wise, you can do by altering the element itself rather than throwing an effect on there (reverse +speed up/slow down, etc).

As far as drums go, it's either breaks. Or processing one shots you would process those messed up jungle breaks the way Squarepusher and Mike P did. Resample the whole drum like and slow it up or down, make the volume stutter, retrigger, etc.

What do you mean by automation? Like I vaguely understand automating a bass, a wobble, but how would it apply to effects?

[Genevieve]

I currently make music similar to Boxcutter's as we both have similar backgrounds (I come from breakcore, while he originally made that Squarepusher'y shit). As for the effects, it's all about automating them or even their individual parameters individually. Having said that, most of the crazy shit you can do effect wise, you can do by altering the element itself rather than throwing an effect on there (reverse +speed up/slow down, etc).

As far as drums go, it's either breaks. Or processing one shots you would process those messed up jungle breaks the way Squarepusher and Mike P did. Resample the whole drum like and slow it up or down, make the volume stutter, retrigger, etc.

What do you mean by automation? Like I vaguely understand automating a bass, a wobble, but how would it apply to effects?

Automate the parameters of the effects. Duration of the delay, value threshhold of the gate, etc. Just go nuts. If it sounds like shit, you'll know it sounds like shit.. or maybe that shitty sound will inspire you to change it into a pretty one with some more modulated filtering and another effect.

Just throwing it out there, really. I mean, I can't tell you what will sound like what, but that's the beauty of it. My drums are basically just stacks of modulated effects parameters or screwed up rhythms, constantly speeding up or slowing down breaks by 200/300/400/500/600 percent.

[ComfiStile]

Anyone know if he still plays around belfast?

[craic_addict]

Haven't seen him in a while Comfi but you know the Acroplane guys or 2nd Mouse? Think he might be playing at the DSNT festival up in Queen's.

[macc]

One of the single nicest people I have met on the circuit... top top top chap and oozing talent.

[street_legal]

boxcutter's tunes are something else. bad you do (halfstep) is one of my favourite tunes!